After an early lunch we had nothing to do so we went dove hunting.  Bernie took six and I shot three.  As the day wore on Jericho became increasingly more out of control.  I tried to handle him to a downed dove on the other side of a muddy ditch and he refused many casts and sit whistles.  Eventually Bernie walked across the ditch at a passable spot and helped Jericho find the bird.  The excitement of a real hunt can sure expose weaknesses in training.
As we settled in back at the camp for the evening, Bernie warned me to expect a much harder hunt in the morning.  He sure wasn't kidding and I soon learned to appreciate just how hard it is to bag a wild pheasant.

We began the second morning back at the same ditch that had been such a jackpot the day before, but it yielded nothing that day.  Nor did any of the four miles of ditches that we worked that morning.  The fruit of the morning for me had nothing to do with birds taken, but rather was in a lesson in persistent dog work in the face of little encouragement.  Bernie's German Short-Hair, Jenny, has either an innate faculty, or a discipline gained through years of experience, for staying in a ditch and hunting its cover as the gunners walk along the ridges.  The tulles would get so thick that you would expect her to give up, but her small body and iron determination seemed to find a way through.  The rustle of the tops of the stalks would mark her progress.  Jericho on the other hand has been taught to either heel at my side while dove hunting, or quarter in front of me when quail hunting, so to get him to stay in the ditch was all but impossible.  Whether it was his lack of experience that had him unconvinced that in the ditch was where the payoff would be, or whether it was the discomfort of being in such nasty cover for long periods of time that kept him out of the ditch, I'm not sure.

As the afternoon wore on the search for ditches that were off the beaten path, and therefore probably not hunted yet, found us hunting a large heavily overgrown ditch along a causeway parallel to a river.  Evidence that this ditch had not been hunted manifested itself shortly as two deer and numerous rabbits flushed out of it in front of our advance.  At this point we employed a common pheasant hunting tactic of placing a person at the end of the ditch to serve as a blocker.  Without a blocker, wild pheasants will simply run along a ditch ahead of the noise of the approaching hunters and escape out of the end of the ditch and jump into another ditch.  The blocker surprises these escaping birds with his presence and they are forced to take flight, hopefully within range of the guns.  Bernie's Dad had enthusiastically volunteered for the blocker position as his post-retirement leg muscles had had enough walking for the day.   As Bernie and I neared a particularly overgrown bend in the ditch, a beautiful rooster exploded out of the ditch on Bernie's side.  Both of us fired, dropping the bird at about 30 yards out.  Jenny was in the process of trying to extract herself from the ditch when I looked up to see Stone (who would've thought) making his way out to the bird for the retrieve.  But look out.  Here comes Jericho who broke from my side when the shooting started.  Jericho refused my whistles and shouts to call him off.   He swooped in on the bird and snatched it up just as Stone was bending over to pick it up.  Luckily Stone was a good sport about it.  Bernie and I argued about who dropped the bird.  We argued along the line of the Disney Chip & Dale cartoon saying, "No. No.  I'm sure it was you." We ended the argument agreeing that most likely we both got a piece of it.  Later, while cleaning the bird, the forensic evidence showed that a single pellet in the back of the head had done the deed.  I'm convinced the hole was too big to have been the #6 shot that I was using and was probably one of Bernie's bigger #4s.

As the day wore on  Jericho tired and  became even more reluctant to hunt down in the ditches,  unless of course, the ditch was full of mud.  Jericho worked it out with Jenny that he would make sure there weren't any pheasants hiding in the mud so she didn't have to look there.   He got in quite a lot of wallowing, occasionally even sticking his whole head in the mud.  Just making sure, I am convinced, that there were no pheasants submersed there.

One the final day even Jenny avoided the ditches.  Her face was sore from the scratches made by the tulles and I am sure her muscles ached even more than my own.  Because of this, and because of minimal success in the ditches the previous day, we decided to hunt the bank of the river.  Once again Bernie's dad positioned himself 300 yards away in waist high cover to serve as blocker.  Bernie, Jenny, Jericho, and I marched towards him.  About 100 yards in a hen burst out to the left, then another burst out to the right. Then finally, a rooster catapulted out to the right over the river.  Bernie and I emptied our guns with the bird safely navigating the barrage and landing on the far shore of the river.  I found the shooting angle quite challenging.   The river bank sloped steeply up to a plateau by the levee where I was walking.  By the time I was able to identify the bird as a rooster, and therefore okay to shoot, the bird was one third the way across the river.  The shot was downhill at a descending bird and the background was the river surface.  Needless to say this is a setup I need to practice.  That's my excuse for missing.  I'm not sure what Bernie's was.  I didn't ask him.

As we reached Bernie's dad , he trotted along the levee to a spot another 300 yards away and we began our drive again.  Within 100 feet a rooster burst out of the cover heading across the river.  Bernie fired and the bird fell halfway across the river just as I fired a half-hearted follow-up shot.  I looked around for Jericho and saw him just as he was leaping into the river.  I had given up on enforcing steadiness at this point.  The other two dogs were watching Jericho from the shoreline with apparent looks of admiration as if they were saying, "This one's all you buddy."  With a feeling of pride I watched Jericho swim out to make the retrieve in what I would call "big water":  at least 150 yards across, slow moving, and cold.  While watching, I fished another shell out of my pocket to reload.  As I broke open my gun to reload, Bernie said, "Be careful.  There may be another rooster here."   I guess it was just hunting intuition that caused Bernie to warn me, but no sooner were the words out of his mouth, then a second rooster launched out of the cover.  We were both caught flat-footed.  I more so than Bernie.  We got off late shots and another bird was safe on the far shore.

Our final drive brought one more rooster out of hiding and this time with me fully prepared.  I'd like to say that I expertly took him down, but that was not the case.  I missed.  Bernie followed my shots with two of his own, followed by two more from Bernie's dad from his blocking position.  None of the shots found the target.  I grieved over my miss for most of the long drive home.  I had to leave the field still having not bagged a wild pheasant.  But as Bernie so succinctly commented as we parted, "Makes you want to come back, doesn't it?"  And he's right.  It does.